Singapore

Welcome to Singapore... drug trafficking is punishable by death, local time is 8pm & current temperature is hokey hot.  That was nearly verbatim the message we heard upon landing there. Night & day different place from Thailand. I'm thankful the girls are getting real feels for just how diversely textured Asia is.

Gentle reminders abound, such as this beside train platform

Plenty of not so gentle reminders as well, rules & such are everywhere. $1,000 fine for riding bike down pedestrian path along river, $500 for eating/drinking on subway...  and they must be enforced because this place is clean, beautiful and rhythmic, yet I don't find it as intense as Japan.

Happy Birthday to you,

You went to the zoo,

You look like a monkey... 

Girls sang after my lovely birthday at the zoo. I'm needing to get more serious about sun protection, so they gifted me with the fun hat.

Great zoo, polar bears were our favorite

Free-roaming monkeys & orangutans were hanging all over

Help me...

Seriously...

Happy Birthday to Dad... cool building trio behind

Night Safari was eery, but nicely done like most everything in S'pore

Highlight was the super active hyenas, wild & freaky

Lovin public transport, but tired from the long day

Her tally is 7 teeth lost in 4 countries

Returned to Thailand a little after midnight last night, and Ry has since lost tooth #8 at her swim practice today. She's wondering how to eat pizza tonight while we Idol. Nice to be home. 

Though I now have a little thing for Singapore, as I really enjoyed that smooth city-state.  Headlining news there this week was the funeral of a founding father.  It had us thinking on why S'pore has become success that it is, and Thailand not. After reading about their Dr. Goh, I'm praying such a public servant figure will arise & lead Thailand in its own beautiful direction.  

Update

We have booked flights to Singapore tomorrow.  Rob needs to be there next week, so we girls might as well tag along. We plan to stay through next week and hopefully return to Thailand next weekend. 

Things have deteriorated quickly this evening in Bangkok and other parts of Thailand, though we have yet to experience anything firsthand. Reports are sickening, with parts of Bangkok in flames.  Fires & unrest in Khon Kaen, where we spent Christmas holiday... wondering if any of our acquaintances there are involved. Strange & confusing, leaving people here behind while we prepare to exit mayhem for a while.

Also interesting to pack up. Not much "stuff" to which I feel attached in the event we get stuck in Singapore for a while. Kids, computer, some clothes...  what else do we need?

Peace, peace, peace.

Life

American Cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France

Seems wrong, but of the places I've been, this is a favorite (?). It is a quiet, hallowed garden that screams & haunts & enriches & stirs, and that is special.

Back in the Mitten when Ry was small, we discussed the US flag flying at half staff each time a Michigan soldier dies in service. Her youthful eyes were never too cataracted by life to miss flags flying somber instead of proud. "Mom, another soldier died." When US casualties in Iraq hit 1,000, we sighed, "Horrible." Today the total is over 4,000.

Friday night we visited Bangkok for Allie's ortho visit.  Her doctor is in a lovely, new shopping mall on edge of town, not near city center's protests. It mostly felt business as usual with affluent Thais & occasional foreigners shopping, eating, and i-testing as if nothing was failing just blocks away. Yet my mind couldn't help drifting to the nearby redzone where 1 person died earlier that day and 1 the previous night. 

Get home, log in, learn 5 died that evening just a couple kilometers from where Al's braces were rewired to fix "imperfect" teeth and we had our Japanese food fix. Saturday night brought more deaths and now Monday morn... 35 lives reported lost in the past 3 days. 

Living so close to this tragedy while in our own safe & privileged expat world is boggling. I feel guilty planning for our family's birthday trifecta this weekend, celebrating life while our new neighbors are losing theirs... in a fight with their government!!!

Peace to all neighborhoods!

Untitled

If you've ever pondered, a gecko can survive an hour long washing machine cycle and come out seemingly alright. Poor thing. I went out to hang clean laundry and found him ready to escape the machine's wrath. He must've crawled into my waiting pile of dirty darks, but finally skittered away with all 4 (clean) legs appearing to work fine

Be sure to ask Rob about his sunset bike ride last week... no, wait, let me tell you! This is the lonely hut he considered sleeping in Monday night. After arriving home early from work that day, he ventured out before dinner for a short ride in jungled mountains behind us and got lost on the quickly darkening, moonless eve  

He went over this fairly remote hill in the pitch of black while I was driving nearby roads, expecting to find him hiking back with flat tire

As I returned home alone & terrified, he happened upon 2 fishermen at this lake and pulled out enough Thai to ask that they please haul his lost self home in their pickup. Only 2 hours late for dinner. If not for fishermen, he may have stayed at previous hut till dawn's first light and we girls may have lost our minds in cobra nightmares. Rob is amassing a growing shelf of memoirs on being lost or losing things (like rental cars) in various kingdoms, empires & republics. I'm slightly anxious for chapters he could write next month in India

Biking adventures or other may have stirred some conjunctivitis, and drops from doctor aren't yet helping. Things like this do seem to require more tropical time to heal

Along highway into Bangkok last weekend

Wild & wacky day during spirit week, against a backdrop of old, beat up lockers. School's working on replacing textbooks with Kindles or laptops, so there won't be such need for new locker space anyway... I appreciate that kind of thinking

A very hot Egypt Day last month

Not much new going on, just trying hard to keep track of everyone. 

A medium size box of Special K costs $12 here.  I don't buy Special K here or anywhere, but noticed it last week when picking up fixins for mueslix & thought I'd share the little pricing tidbit.  Looking forward to returning next month to West Michigan prices on favorite foods from home. Strawberry fields & Pereddie's deli...here we come.

I hear the rolling thunder. Monsoon season is upon us.  

10 Thai Loves

Last weekend we took part in a cross cultural training retreat at resort near Bangkok... gorgeous setting on a river where we spied this monk just before breakfast

Our family bungalow

Roald Dahl would've loved this place & its many critters

Ry learning traditional Thai Bamboo Dance with Maria

Love...

Love...

Can't say that I love the innuendo that's so very prevalent here, but it can provide comic relief to things like ice cream

We dread missing out on lives of loved ones back home. Our first nephew Tristan Alexander was just born at 34 weeks gestation, healthy & doing well. Rob's sister Lisa was able to keep incubating him for 6 weeks from a hospital bed after her water broke at just 28 weeks... nice work, Mama! Welcome to this big, beautiful world Tristan!

Ever since my own girls were in utero, I have sung to them the alluring lines from Miss Saigon,

"On the other side of the earth
There's a place where life still has worth
I will take you, I'll go with you.
You won't believe all the things you'll see,
I know 'cause you'll see them all with me..."

I always had Japan in mind while crooning this song, then up popped Europe and Thailand. Beggars can't be choosers, so thank you, Johnson Controls, for the other sides of earth you have gifted to us.

Thai politics is heating up, and we're having to talk about things like evacuation plans should the unlikely need arise...we'd probably head to Singapore or Malaysia for a bit. Recent events are making us stop & better appreciate things we love about Thailand. A few of my favorites, in no particular order:

1.  Fruit Vendors - literally everywhere, it's simple to purchase a little bag of healthy, chunked, fresh fruit on the streets.

2.  Sunsets - my pictures don't do justice. Grateful for living on the sunset side of Lake Mich, but tropical sunsets are extra special

3. Mai Pen Rai - a phrase & concept that permeates Thai culture, no literal translation, but roughly "no big deal", "it's okay", "you're welcome", "no worries", "oh, well", "never mind". It's a beautiful phrase used in varied circumstances to avoid confrontation or making others feel bad, and I am working to better incorporate the words & spirit in my own journey

4.  Smiles - aptly named the Land of Smiles and if you smile at most Thais, not only will they smile back, but it'll be the biggest ear-to-ear grin you've seen in a long time. Thais smile right through to their eyes, genuine. At times I can't help but wonder how they can possibly smile, and then I witness their spirit of mai pen rai and am envious of their ability to grin through thick or thin

5.  I'm (Kinda) Tall Here - My 64 inches usually make me the tallest when in a group of Thai women, and even men sometimes. Again living a dream, I enjoy feeling tall

6.  Thai Yoga Class - yoga here has clicked with me like never before. My amazing Thai instructor conducts the all-Asian class entirely in Thai... I zone out, don't have a clue what she's saying, just follow along and it's wonderful! Again, mai pen rai if I don't completely get the full physiological benefit of each & every stretch. I'm smiling & happy & that's of benefit. I'm curious if I'll enjoy yoga back home some day where the instructor speaks English

7. Mountainous Landscape - our Thai landscape is simply gorgeous. I love mountains, but have nothing of the sort near our enchanted Waukazoo Woods, so am relishing the small mountain peaks & palm tree terrain I see daily when driving or simply looking out our window

8.  Flowers - Orchids in particular, but I am a lover of all flora & appreciate being able to fill the house with blooms for pennies compared to home. My only limit here is the sniffles I need to avoid inducing in my allergic husband

9.  Lemongrass - Love the energizing scent found everywhere from hotel soaps & shampoos to oil burners and food. I don't recall ever seeing it fresh back home, and hope I can find there someday

10.  Tom Yum - with the exception of some green curries, I adore eating Thai and if the girls were on board, could eat it fresh most every night. Tom Yum Kung (shrimp) is my absolute favorite, and I really hope I'll be able to find the goods to correctly reproduce it back home

These are just 10 of the umpteen things coming to mind when I ponder my Thai loves.

I still can't wait to share Japan with the girls, and finally we will! We booked flights last month for snowboarding there in December... hot onsen, snow monkeys, cozy futons, big ol' bowls of noodles, tea ceremony, bullet trains, Tokyo at rush hour, toilet seats with more apps than i-phones, the art of bowing... I'm a little excited to introduce AJ-chan & Mei-chan and ride snowy mountains.

But until then I'll keep soaking up Siam.  I'm so very grateful Rob introduced us to another piece of earth where life still has such worth. Peace to Thailand!

Monsoon Country

These, my friends, are what perfect mangoes look like. We go through 10 or 12 a week, smoothies galore!

Rambutan. Stumbled across them a bit in literature over the years, but never knew what one looked like till coming here

Not much flavor, but juicy with a small pit inside. Rambutan are kind of fun to say & eat... every time I sit down to enjoy a bowl, the cracking open of bristled peel reminds that I'm not in Holland anymore

In Holland we can't buy 8 stems of orchids for 40 baht... just over a dollar!  Ry still doesn't enjoy visiting local open markets here, as the smells can about knock one over, but picking out fresh flowers makes it more tolerable.  A few days ago little ones there were following her around, wanting to touch her golden braids. Some kiddos had peanuts in the shell and Ry was amused by their shelling technique of setting them on the ground & stomping with their barefoot heel to open... harder on the feet than simply handing to mom & asking please, but moms here have mangoes & orchids to move at market

The healing knee

It's not a cobra. Last weekend my friend watched gardeners RUN madly (gardeners here don't usually run... it's part of that surviving-the-heat thing), whacking at this 2m long serpent on the rough they'd just cut on her backyard golf course. After they killed it, this guy swung it over his head like a lasso. There's a decent chance he brought it home & ate it, seriously. Pink trucks & taxis are common here

So are peachy sunsets we see most evenings

Thailand is restless, and red shirts are rising. Things remain quiet by us. The heated protesting is almost entirely in Bangkok, a huge expanse of city where trouble has been localized to a few areas.  Protests are also uniting in Khon Kaen, the impoverished area in the north where we visited at Christmas.  None of this is new to Thailand and some feel it will blow over, possibly with another coup as is the pattern here. A unique concern with this uprising is the King's health.  He's been ailing in hospital for months, and worry is that opportunity could be ripe for major unrest & anarchy.  Long live the King, but still problems remain.

We've been talking with the girls and drawing parallels to the French Revolution to help them understand. Largely poor, rural red shirts are the hungry French peasants storming Versailles. We are exposing the girls to wonderful and not so wonderful things. Opportunities to learn. But how much do we just let them be kids & not bog them down with heaviness that abounds?  And how much do we challenge them to genuinely care, form founded opinions and perhaps take action? Wish it was spelled out in a chapter of that perfect parenting book for which we all long, but does not exist.

A beautiful read that does exist is Monsoon Country by Pira Sudham.  I finished it last week on holiday.  It explores the divide between poor, rural Thailand and wealthy West, and is set a generation before my own, but has timelessness. 

I'm often asked, what is the hardest thing about living in Thailand?  The heat is a strong contender, but witnessing & experiencing massive socioeconomic disparity is a true challenge, even from our privileged vantage.  Vacationing a few weeks in poor, desperate places is so vastly different from living there.  I wasn't expecting those differences to hit me with such intensity. 

We are days from arrival of monsoonal rains.  I feel them looming as skies have grown heavy with occasional downpours & distant thunder. A slew of new bugs are on the move & trying to reside in our house.  Temperatures are on the final push of their upper limits. Heat hasn't seemed to affect the protests, Thais can take the heat and the rains.  Motorbikers press through pounding showers, while pick-up trucks carry crouched, drenched people. 

Politics & military history are filled with weather-affected outcomes.  I hope these protests don't have the outcome of just blowing over with the change to an impossibly wet season... the 25 deaths of April 10 would be all the more senseless and sad. My hopes may be naive, but there are populations here that need respite from their economic storms cycling sure as the monsoon.  Mayuri has been exploited to literal death.  Palm & her community have barely a chance of breaking the slum pattern. And "unwanted" babies still fill Vietnam-era orphanages in this land of smiles where orchids are happy & mangoes are perfect.

Spring Break

Much like & unlike a Michigander's pilgrimage to Mackinac Island, we drove 4 hours Monday morning to the coast near Cambodian border where we car ferried another 1/2 hour to Thailand's second largest, mountainous rainforest island   

Greeted with Happy Songkran, the Thai New Year & water festival meant crazy & slow driving all week in the comfort of our rolled-up windowed truck.  Motorbikers didn't fare so well, or perhaps they did.... another hot, 100 humid degree week

Kids from 1 to 92 had a blast with buckets & super soakers

Passed a monkey on side of the road, only one we saw all week

Hardly a gas pump on the island, but lots of old whisky bottles recycled for selling petro... equates to about $6/gallon

Tuesday, we opted for pachyderm power to explore the jungled hills

Never before limboed atop a riverbed-tiptoeing elephant... now I have

Cool to see allergy-plagued Rob enjoying his first time ever riding a large mammal... stirred his sniffles a smidge, but not too badly

After trekking, we got to give all of these beautiful girls a bath

Most riverbeds are dry by this time of year, but this deep & frigid one still works

As Al gave her elephant a bath, she reciprocated Al with a shower

In this water, how many little germs may lurk that could aggravate a 4-day old sutured knee? Who cares... I get to swim with an elephant!

Ry's elephant is 50 years old and will hopefully live to 90 or 100

Many Thai elephants are abused. I guess what we were doing was abuse, but this camp appeared more conservation conscious and keeps their elephants in a natural setting where they roam & graze without painful chains & barbs

Lather, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat was Al's elephant's nature. Happy Songkran, her mahout kept telling her

Banana flower

Things grow big in Thailand... this, about the size of Ry's hand

Durian, a smelly fruit about the size of a pineapple

Ohh, how I loathe fresh coconut milk, but I say thank you & smile

Thankful for an amazing day with some amazing creatures in a splendid setting

Our afternoon ritual after adventuring the great outdoors

Wednesday we explored a long day under the sea, joining 6 scuba divers for an hour & half boat ride out to deeper waters

Made 2 different dive stops near Koh Tien & Koh Yak in a nature preserve of sorts... allows divers, but no fishing

Girls now want to stay a third year so they can get their open water dive certification, Ry can't until she's 10

Both girls were FANtastic snorkelers. We knew Allie could handle it, but were a bit nervous for Ry. She's become a powerful little swimmer the past few months with having a pool & she figured out the snorkel, salt, waves, deep waters just fine with Rob's help. We went out for a bunch of 20-30 minute dives in deep waters, no vest

AMAZING sealife... and no photos of it, sorry to say... will probably do more of this, so gonna research H2O cameras. We have only snorkeled a touch in Cozumel & Venezuela, but this trumped both of those wee experiences and we couldn't get over the immense variety the Pacific offers. A few things our eyes spied: marbled sea cucumber, squamose giant clam, tons of black diadema sea urchins, forests of coral including tube, brain, fine table, sun mushroom, fan, funnel, Hemprich's soft, and we swam through huge schools of fish of every color of the rainbow

Back at the docks, girls had more water fun with Songkran festivities

Thursday included a drive down the island coast to a quiet beach where, for the cost of a matinee feature film, we got foot massages & pedicures

Not much motion in this picture

Allie while she was still enjoying her foot massage... the guy ended up using a balm (with black pepper in it) on her legs that burned a couple of her open sores to the point of tears

Kind of intrigued with the layering they do for thatched rooves on huts

Friday was Happy Birthday, Riley Mei!

Adorably 8

She wanted a salon that morn...

...for some island birthday braids.  72 braids took nearly 3 hours

Al had no interest in braids for herself & wasn't smiling all 3 hours, but Take 2 on the pedicure helped

Afternoon turned stormy

A taste of coming May monsoons

Girls had a dance party while rains poured

Birthday dinner... Italian, of course, for pasta loving Ry

We had dined here earlier in the week & this is where Ry wanted to return. I arranged a sweet little party with the owner from Milan 

Lovin her strawberry tiramisu... the owner's emailing me her recipe

Sweetheart Fernanda... the girls have a way of getting invited back into quaint kitchens. Ry learned that Italian pizza is baked at 350 degrees C (hot!) for just 2 minutes 

Our home for the week

Drove home through steady, heavy rain Saturday. Holiday is over, for Thais too.  At our Meijer equivalency this weekend, everything was out for back to school. Strange feeling for us in April, but this is when Thai school year commences. Ours wraps up in 8 weeks.  Girls & I'll be home June 27-July 23, Rob just shy of the last 2 of those weeks.  Mixed feelings about going home, as most of the time will be anything but vacation, but trying to keep it light for the girls. Happy for the R&R we were gifted this week.